# Paper on supermechanics

 The paper On a geometric framework for Lagrangian supermechanics‘ with Katarzyna Grabowska and Giovanni Moreno now been published in The Journal of Geometric Mechanics (JGM).

In the paper we re-examine Lagrangian mechanics on supermanifolds (loosely manifolds’ with both commuting and anticommuting coordinates) in the geometric framework of Tulczyjew [2]. The only real deviation from the classical setting is that one now needs to understand curves in a more categorical framework as maps $$S \times \mathbb R \rightarrow M$$, where $$M$$ is the supermanifold understudy and $$S$$ is some arbitrary supermanifold [1]. Thus one needs to think of families of curves parameterised by arbitrary supermanifolds and thus we have families of Lagrangians similarly parameterised. In our opinion, although the super-mechanics is now an old subject, none of the existing literature really explains what a solution to the dynamics is. We manage to describe the phase dynamics in this super-setting and give real meaning to solutions thereof, albeit one needs to think more categorically than the classical case.

Our philosophy is that time is the only true meaningful parameter describing dynamics on supermanifolds. The auxiliary parameterisations by $$S$$ are necessary in order to property track out’ paths on the supermanifold, but they must play no fundamental role in the theory other than that. Mathematically, this is described in terms of category theory as all the constructions are natural in $$S$$. This basically means that if we change $$S$$ then the theory is well behaved and that nothing fundamentally depends on our choice of $$S$$. The theory holds for all $$S$$, and to fully determine the dynamics one needs to consider all supermanifolds as probes’ – in more categorical language we are constructing certain functors. This seems to take us away from the more familiar setting of classical mechanics, but it seems rather unavoidable. Supermanifolds are examples of mild’ noncommutative spaces and as such we cannot expect there to be a very simple and universal notion of a curve – this is tied to the localisation problem in noncommutative geometry. Specifically, supermanifolds are not just collections of points together with a topology (or something similar).

The bottom line is that the classical framework of geometric mechanics following Tulczyjew generalises to the super-case upon taking some care with this extended’ notion of a curve.

References
[1] A. J. Bruce, On curves and jets of curves on supermanifolds, Arch. Math. (Brno), 50 (2014), 115-130.
[2] W. M. Tulczyjew, The Legendre transformation, Ann. Inst. H. Poincaré Sect. A (N.S.), 27 (1977), 101-114.